Q. I guess that makes me curious about how one of these farms might try to reach folks who are getting accustomed to eating locally and knowing their farmers.
A. Where I live there a lot of crops that you can't get a hold of during the winter. So indoor farming allows for more variety.
I know a lot of chefs in New York City who won't cook with foods that aren't locally grown and seasonal. That means in the wintertime you're eating a very different set of menu items than you are in the summer.
That might be okay to some people, but restaurants are not going to be the salvation for the next 3 billion people who are coming up over the next 40 years. I totally agree with Michael Pollan's point of view and I used to recommend his book in my class. But that's not the solution to world hunger. And he knows it, too.* Because if you go to places like Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, where they don't have any soil, [vertical farms] offer a viable solution for otherwise having to import all your food.
Not that this is the only solution, by the way.
*ed. note: We're not positive Pollan would agree that building local food systems can't help feed the world. See him address some of this issue in this debate with a spokesperson from the seed giant Monsanto.
Q. How much of our food do you think should be grown this way?
A. Well, it depends on where you live. If I lived in Iceland I'd grow all my food this way; I wouldn't import anything. Because energy is not the important issue there -- they have geothermal energy, so it wouldn't matter how efficient the grow lights were. It's also true for other parts of the U.S. where you have readily available solar or wind energy.
The biggest stumbling blocks to developing this on a large scale is the amount of energy it will consume for the grow lights.
Q. There is something a little strange about compartmentalizing your food production away from soil, wildlife, nature, etc. Based on what you say in the book, it sounds like you'd be fine to completely separate the two.
A. Farming has caused the biggest upset of natural systems that the world has ever experienced. We find ourselves with great parts of South America as farmland, and with lots of global climate change issues that can only be addressed if we have the proper mechanisms in place to take care of them -- namely trees. A large corporation like Monsanto isn't going to start growing trees, so as I see it if I can teach Monsanto how to grow corn and soy indoors, and take up one-tenth of the space or less, maybe there's some hope.
The biggest issue is how you get food to all these people, and right now what we're doing isn't working.
Q. We also waste 40 percent of the food we produce in this country, so that's a huge part of the equation, and we grow a lot of food for animals. So if we shifted those equations it would go a long way toward feeding more people.
A. You could say that. Some Cornell scientist said that you could feed about 800 million more people if you stopped feeding grain to animals [in the U.S. alone]. You think that's a lot of people -- 800 million? In the next 40 years there will be 3 billion more.
But climate change is everybody's problem. And I see trees as the simplest leave-the-land-alone-and-everything-will-grow-back solution.
You don't have to plant them, the tree seeds are in the ground and they're being inhibited by herbicides. If you were to simply stop farming, they'd come back. I've been to Aldo Leopold's abandoned farm, and it's a great example of what I'm taking about.Twilight is the food editor at Grist. Follow her on twitter.
A. Where I live there a lot of crops that you can't get a hold of during the winter. So indoor farming allows for more variety.
I know a lot of chefs in New York City who won't cook with foods that aren't locally grown and seasonal. That means in the wintertime you're eating a very different set of menu items than you are in the summer.
That might be okay to some people, but restaurants are not going to be the salvation for the next 3 billion people who are coming up over the next 40 years. I totally agree with Michael Pollan's point of view and I used to recommend his book in my class. But that's not the solution to world hunger. And he knows it, too.* Because if you go to places like Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, where they don't have any soil, [vertical farms] offer a viable solution for otherwise having to import all your food.
Not that this is the only solution, by the way.
*ed. note: We're not positive Pollan would agree that building local food systems can't help feed the world. See him address some of this issue in this debate with a spokesperson from the seed giant Monsanto.
Q. How much of our food do you think should be grown this way?
A. Well, it depends on where you live. If I lived in Iceland I'd grow all my food this way; I wouldn't import anything. Because energy is not the important issue there -- they have geothermal energy, so it wouldn't matter how efficient the grow lights were. It's also true for other parts of the U.S. where you have readily available solar or wind energy.
The biggest stumbling blocks to developing this on a large scale is the amount of energy it will consume for the grow lights.
Q. There is something a little strange about compartmentalizing your food production away from soil, wildlife, nature, etc. Based on what you say in the book, it sounds like you'd be fine to completely separate the two.
A. Farming has caused the biggest upset of natural systems that the world has ever experienced. We find ourselves with great parts of South America as farmland, and with lots of global climate change issues that can only be addressed if we have the proper mechanisms in place to take care of them -- namely trees. A large corporation like Monsanto isn't going to start growing trees, so as I see it if I can teach Monsanto how to grow corn and soy indoors, and take up one-tenth of the space or less, maybe there's some hope.
The biggest issue is how you get food to all these people, and right now what we're doing isn't working.
Q. We also waste 40 percent of the food we produce in this country, so that's a huge part of the equation, and we grow a lot of food for animals. So if we shifted those equations it would go a long way toward feeding more people.
A. You could say that. Some Cornell scientist said that you could feed about 800 million more people if you stopped feeding grain to animals [in the U.S. alone]. You think that's a lot of people -- 800 million? In the next 40 years there will be 3 billion more.
But climate change is everybody's problem. And I see trees as the simplest leave-the-land-alone-and-everything-will-grow-back solution.
You don't have to plant them, the tree seeds are in the ground and they're being inhibited by herbicides. If you were to simply stop farming, they'd come back. I've been to Aldo Leopold's abandoned farm, and it's a great example of what I'm taking about.Twilight is the food editor at Grist. Follow her on twitter.
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